from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Nearly 100 million miles from Earth, on the red and dusty surface of Mars, an instrument the size of a lunchbox is proving it can reliably do the work of a small tree.
The MIT-led Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, has been successfully producing oxygen from the Red Planet’s carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere since April 2021. That was about two months after it touched down on the Martian surface as part of NASA’s Perseverance rover and Mars 2020 mission.
In a study published today (August 31, 2022) in the journal Science Advances, researchers report that, by the end of 2021, MOXIE was able to produce oxygen on seven experimental runs. These were performed in a variety of atmospheric conditions, including during the day and night, and through different Martian seasons. In each experimental run, the instrument reached its target of producing six grams of oxygen per hour. This is about the rate of a modest tree on Earth.
Scientists envision that a scaled-up version of MOXIE could be sent to Mars ahead of a human mission, where it could continuously produce oxygen at the rate of several hundred trees. At that capacity, the system should produce enough oxygen to sustain humans after they arrive, and also fuel a rocket for returning astronauts back to Earth.
MOXIE’s consistent production so far is a promising first step toward that goal.
“We have learned a tremendous amount that will inform future systems at a larger scale,” says Michael Hecht, principal investigator of the MOXIE mission at MIT’s Haystack Observatory.
MOXIE’s oxygen production on Mars also represents the first demonstration of “in-situ resource utilization.” This is the idea of harvesting and using a planet’s raw materials (in this case, carbon dioxide on Mars) to make resources (such as oxygen) that would otherwise have to be transported from Earth.
“This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planetary body, and transforming them chemically into something that would be useful for a human mission,” says MOXIE deputy principal investigator Jeffrey Hoffman, a professor of the practice in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “It’s historic in that sense.”
Journal Reference:
Jeffrey A. Hoffman, Michael H. Hecht, Donald Rapp, et al. “Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE)—Preparing for human Mars exploration” 31 August 2022, Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abp8636
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Sunday September 04 2022, @03:53PM (25 children)
I got interested enough to look up how much energy MOXIE consumes per gram, something I don't recall actually seeing in many times it's hit the news. According to this page [nasa.gov]:
MOXIE is rated at 300W and to produce 10g of oxygen per hour
It sounds like 6g/hour is the intended rate for these experiments - so I assume they're just not running it at full power?.
At any rate, it would seem that the production rate is between 6g/300Wh and 10g/300Whr - or between 0.02 and 0.033g/Wh
For comparison, sounds like electrolysis of water typically consumes about 6.3kWh/kg of oxygen, or about 0.16 g/Wh, about 5-8x as much. It would seem that MOXIE would not be the preferred method of oxygen production.
Meanwhile it sounds like an average human a requires 840g/day of oxygen, 35g/hour. So at MOXIE levels that translates to around 1-1.8KW average power draw per person, while electrolysis would require an average 220W/person. Of course electrolysis also requires mining water - that's likely to be energy intensive as well.
I couldn't find numbers for Sadoway's electrolytic magma refinery to compare - but since that requires melting stone as the first step I'm guessing the energy requirements are going to be pretty outrageous - at least without efficient thermal reclamation. On the bright side though it only requires raw regolith, no ice mining needed, and you get a whole bunch of steel and cast stone as byproducts
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2022, @04:05PM (4 children)
Thank you for these numbers. I didn't find it particularly helpful when they gave the oxygen production rate in units of trees.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Thexalon on Sunday September 04 2022, @07:12PM (3 children)
Science articles written for Americans will use practically any unit of measurement other than metric: Football fields, for instance.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Monday September 05 2022, @09:49AM
As an Engineer in USA, I find it oddly comforting other countries see this too.
We've lost it. And I have no idea how long our financial inertia will carry us. I believed it should have already happened, with the Yuan being the world's reserve currency, backed by being the world's manufacturing base . We have become a nation of merchants, accountants, bankers, and landlords. Few people make anything.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2022, @02:28PM (1 child)
I'm not sure that's entirely the reason here because I don't think anybody commonly knows how many trees for oxygen production that a human needs to survive.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday September 07 2022, @08:19AM
Did they get anything from the biosphere experiments of the 80's?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-yAcD3wuY2Q [youtube.com]
I take it they had a pretty good idea of what was going in and out of that thing. Especially consumables.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Sunday September 04 2022, @05:04PM (4 children)
I guess the first step towards Mars is a nuclear reactor. This one weighs 80 tonnes. 30 year lifetime, refuel every 5 years. 4 MW of electrical power (enough to provide MOXIE oxygen for about 1000 people, if I follow the maths correctly):
https://www.business-live.co.uk/technology/mini-nuclear-reactor-could-providing-23056860 [business-live.co.uk]
Life deserves to be spread. Viriditas.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday September 04 2022, @05:37PM (3 children)
A single Kilopower [wikipedia.org] reactor could provide 10 kW, enough for 5 people, which is probably in line with how many people NASA would want on the surface in the short term.
Also, could future versions of MOXIE reach higher efficiency?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday September 07 2022, @08:28AM (2 children)
Speaking of Kilopower nuclear reactors, has anyone gotten much of an idea of the viability of Rossi's E-Cat?
From what I can tell, this has been going on for a quarter-century now, with still no evidence as I can see, one way or the other.
Promises, and reports, but no evidence other than the frustration of Steven Krivit of New Energy Times .
https://news.newenergytimes.net/about-steven-b-krivit-and-new-energy-times/ [newenergytimes.net]
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday September 07 2022, @10:18PM (1 child)
I think Emdrive got more respect than E-Cat, and it's pretty much dead.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday September 08 2022, @12:10AM
Dead. My sentiment as well.
Rossi is still pitching claims of units in production. Investor beware. Industrial Heat paid millions and all they got were handshakes from men wearing business suits.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Sunday September 04 2022, @06:50PM (1 child)
It may not be the most efficient way to get oxygen if you have plentiful water, but if your water is scarce, highly valuable, and hard to get to, it may be preferred.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 05 2022, @01:26PM
Yeah. Could be really handy for long-range expedition vehicles and remote outposts of all types, just probably not for colonies - which will almost certainly built someplace where they have convenient access to at least a few cubic miles of ice.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday September 05 2022, @04:36AM (12 children)
The MOXIE process also generates carbon monoxide (CO), which is a useful reducing agent for smelting. You can get a bunch of steel as a byproduct as well.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 05 2022, @02:26PM (11 children)
You need fairly iron-rich ore for traditional smelting to be effective though, don't you? I'm sure they'll find that eventually (and build the mining infrastructure to extract it), but the abundant regolith only contains about 2% iron oxides and 9% aluminum oxides. Electrolytic extraction works with whatever you've got, and is a far simpler process (= far less infrastructure required). All you need is a high-temperature crucible and the right electrodes. Not to mention it only requires changing the electrodes and electrical profile to also extract magnesium, calcium, nickle, zinc, and sodium while you're at it - which are all present in larger quantities than iron in Martian soil. (Disclaimer - I don't believe we've found suitable electrodes and profiles for all of those yet).
Plus, as a near-free bonus it should be easy to enough to capture small amounts of water and other useful materials evaporating off while heating the regolith - sort of a fractional distillation from solids. The chlorine in particular would be especially useful in combination with sodium - table salt is an important ingredient for Earth life after all. In fact, the exact same heating stage might be well suited to also processing even extremely dirty ice into fairly pure water. You might be able do that more energy efficiently other ways - but distillation is extremely simple and reliable, and if you've already got a huge thermal harvesting system in place to melt rock anyway...
Solar-thermal heating won't be quite as cheap and easy as on the moon - even low-pressure wind makes simple inflatable parabolic reflectors a lot more troublesome. But the whole system is still considerably simpler in both the amount and sophistication of the equipment needed to get from abundant natural resources to production-ready materials than pretty much any other process, which is a huge consideration when trying to boot-strap an industrial base on another world.
Plus, large nuclear reactors will almost certainly be needed fairly early on in any realistic colonization plan, and produce twice as much waste heat as they do electricity. Sadly it's at too low a temperature for melting stone, but distilling water from ice could actually be one of the best heat sinks available for such reactors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2022, @02:31PM (1 child)
Do they do this now? If not, it sounds like something that should be put on the tech development pathway sooner than later.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 05 2022, @04:53PM
They're not do *anything* now, other than a few proof of concepts - and soil analysis that is proof of concept enough to establish that there is in fact water in the soil.
The necessary technology is trivial - hair and clothes dryers are the most common examples in daily life. We don't normally capture the water vapor since water is cheap here, but that's trivial technology as well, we've been distilling stuff for centuries.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday September 05 2022, @02:37PM (1 child)
Phosphorous is also an important requirement to grow stuff.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 05 2022, @05:07PM
Mars seems to be fairly rich in phosphates. And sulfur compounds. Lots of nitrates too - as high as 1000ppm, (compare to 5-10ppm in most "wild" Earth soil). That pretty much covers the agricultural big six: CHONPS.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 05 2022, @04:05PM (6 children)
From here [researchgate.net] soil samples measured on Mars are yielding estimates of 10-17% (after removing the normalization) iron oxides and 5-11% aluminum oxides. It's worth mentioning that there are other metals that can be extracted with possible value: sodium, calcium, and magnesium. Magnesium in particular would alloy well with aluminum and some sodium and calcium would be needed for food production.
Also the ready presence of carbon means that you can more easily make steels.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 05 2022, @05:14PM (5 children)
Hmm, wonder why this disagrees? At any rate, that'd be even better. Presumably different regions have different mineral distributions as well.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 05 2022, @05:34PM (4 children)
Should have previewed:
this [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 05 2022, @06:37PM (3 children)
At a glance, SiO2 and FeO look skimpy compared to the rest until you realize they're actually ten times as high! And nickel isn't double the amount of FeO (a thing I was trying to figure out), but 500 times less actually.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 05 2022, @07:10PM (2 children)
Good catch, I completely missed that, even when going back to it! I went straight to the full-sized image, which doesn't include the footnotes. I suppose the ridiculously low SiO2 levels should have been a dead giveaway that the *'s were really important rather than further commentary.
That graph really needs to be updated - a visual representation should ALWAYS make it obvious when scale distortions are introduced. Maybe three adjacent graphs with different scales?
Too bad about the nickel and zinc... though maybe it's actually for the best, I seem to recall nickel at least being a rather nasty environmental contaminant. (heavy metal poisoning?)
But hey, 20% iron is better than the moon!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 05 2022, @08:18PM (1 child)
It's a music wasteland that destroys the young!
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 05 2022, @08:40PM
I thought that was rock and roll? No, wait, that corrupts the young with drugs and sex!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Sunday September 04 2022, @06:16PM (3 children)
Is this the same technology used in the carbon capture experiments here on Earth? There's a whole lot more CO2 here than Mars. In fact, there's way too much. There's one here in Springfield.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Monday September 05 2022, @02:47PM (2 children)
No.
MOXIE converts the nearly-pure (95%) CO2 in the Martian atmosphere to oxygen and CO... which will react fairly rapidly with any ambient oxygen to become CO2 again.
Generally speaking though a huge part of the problem for carbon capture is not doing something with the CO2 - though that's certainly a challenge to do without consuming a lot more energy than was generated when producing the CO2.
The big problem is concentrating the CO2 to levels that you can work with efficiently in the first place. Despite its humongously outsized influence on global temperature, it's still only about 0.04% of the atmosphere. If I recall correctly, nitrogen(78%) in particular tends to get caught up in a lot of the same reactions that bind CO2 - to the point that many plants actually evolved to breathe overnight to store up CO2, and then photosynthesize the concentrated CO2 during the day for a massive efficiency boost.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday September 09 2022, @04:33PM (1 child)
That was informative, thanks. They're reporting that CWLP's carbon capture (I think it's still a U of I test) has reached 95% efficiency, which I assume means they can remove 95% of the carbon from coal smoke and sell it to people who manufacture concrete.
One of their generators (coal-fired) broke, and they're replacing it with a solar farm at half the cost of repairing the generator.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday September 09 2022, @10:17PM
No idea what efficiency means with carbon capture - that would imply there's an "ideal" minimum energy required to separate the gasses, wouldn't it?
At any rate they're working with flue gasses, which does vastly simplify the endeavour since you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of times greater concentration of CO2 than in the atmosphere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2022, @11:31PM (2 children)
It's bad enough Earth is polluted. Next up: Mars!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Monday September 05 2022, @02:47PM (1 child)
Mars has died from runaway global cooling, atmospheric thinning and destruction of magnetosphere. Bringing life to Mars, and other parts of the solar system, should be a goal for humanity.
To put it another way, we can't pollute that which is already dead. We can only make it better.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 05 2022, @05:31PM
Hear, hear!
Though at this point it's far from confirmed that Mars is actually dead - the (very few) experiments that have specifically looked for life have all come back positive, even if later analysis suggested other explanations for those results. Everything we know suggests that Mars was once ripe for the evolution of life, and if it ever got started then at least a lot of the extremophiles will probably still be around. For example, I doubt something living ten miles underground really cares much what happens at the surface.
We could learn an enormous amount from studying alien life, but it may become almost impossible to find after Earth life colonizes the planet. Even if the two end up coexisting it could be almost impossible to establish that some of the microbes in a sample are Martian - especially if they look similar under a microscope, which they probably would since form follows function. Bacteria have very limited opportunities for self-expression.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Username on Monday September 05 2022, @01:22AM (8 children)
I've always liked the scifi about genetically engineering plants and seeding worlds with them to terraform so we can live on them in 200 years. This kind of darth vader tech is interesting but doesn't seem feasible on a planetary scale in my brain. Not even deathstar scale makes sense.
Where are we with labs reproducing martian conditions to genetically adapt hemp/fern plants? Do we even have them? I bet there isn't any, the hippies don't want us to spoil the native martian landscapes with our GMO super plants. I think those hippies are just secret acolytes of zaadur. Humans first I say. Fuck gandorans and their ice warriors. If they were so great their planet wouldn't be an unlivable red shithole.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2022, @01:58AM (4 children)
Does Mars terraforming make sense if the new atmosphere is just going to be blown away again? Best I can do is giant domes with plants in them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2022, @01:33PM (1 child)
It just means that you need to create atmosphere faster than it loses it. I presume the loss rate isn't too bad since there is still some atmosphere there now, but that's after you've gotten to the point where you've created enough atmosphere you need. We're going to be living in domes and caves for many many years unless they can find those alien ice melters before then.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 05 2022, @07:16PM
Exactly.
Better yet, atmosphere loss is a problem on geologic timescales, not human ones. Build the atmosphere up to walk on the surface, and even if you then stopped completely it'd likely be millions of years before it became an issue again. As a rule I try not to worry too much about problems that won't come up for longer than the current age of my species.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 05 2022, @04:07PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 05 2022, @07:20PM
Or any sort of shield to block the solar wind. A huge electrostatic solar-wind sail out beyond the L1 point might be an interesting option as well, with minimal materials. Though I'm not sure how electron-gun's power draw would compare to maintaining an artificial magnetic field.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 05 2022, @04:08AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday September 05 2022, @03:34PM
Yeah, I'm a big fan of biotechnology for Mars colonization. Even aside from terraforming (where any other technology is *definitely* not up to the size of the job), why would you want to tie your survival to hardware that needs constant maintenance and must be manufactured from a high-technology base, when you could use self-replicating plants to do the same job?
For terraforming though I think hemp, etc are complete non-starters. Between the dry conditions, sub-freezing temperatures, near-total vacuum, high radiation levels, and toxic perchlorate-rich soil, it seems unlikely that large organisms evolved for Earth conditions will be able to survive on the surface. *Maybe* you could adapt some Antarctic plants to handle the vacuum too... but even they will be hard pressed to handle the radiation and perchlorates.
Microorganisms though are a completely different proposition. We already know of several that should have no problem surviving on the surface, some of which actually feed on the perchlorates. And the radiation may actually help in the long term - single celled organisms don't have to worry about cancer or other cumulative radiation problems - they just die and get eaten by their neighbors on the day it happens. Meanwhile, it increases mutation rates in a hostile environment, and among microorganisms that may reproduce several times per day, natural evolution tends to work way faster and more creatively than genetic engineering (though intelligent redesign still has its advantages for escaping local maximums and introducing beneficial side effects that don't directly benefit the individual)
As I recall, there was a study a while back suggesting that just laying large fields of clear plastic on the Martian surface would create a much warmer, wetter environment underneath, allowing a far wider range of microorganisms to thrive. And a thriving ecosystem adjacent to a much harsher one is the ideal setting for evolution to start pushing boundaries. Especially when there's a nice gentle gradient between them, like the progressively colder, drier conditions as you approach the edge of the plastic.
Once you've got a planet-wide thriving microbial ecosystem, *then* you've got an ecological foundation to start introducing complex organisms. Even on Earth microbes (mostly algae) outmass all other life by around 30:1 . Trying to bring another planet to life starting anywhere else is kind of like trying to build a house starting with the roofing tiles.
And even for mostly-closed colonies, an algae farm can produce sugar and oxygen, and even cellulose, etc. MUCH faster than any other plant. And exponential growth rates mean that if something goes wrong with a farm (or a new one is built) you can just sterilize it, inoculate it with a fresh scoop of algae, and have the whole thing grown back to producing maximum yields within weeks if not days.
Lots of other useful microbes too - NASA did a bunch of work back in the ... 60s? 70s?... on hydrogen-feeding bacteria to rapidly produce food for long-duration missions. Nothing has come of it yet in space, but a couple years back a company here on Earth (California, I think) started looking to commercialize the technology for domestic use, producing substitutes for traditional sugar, flour, protein powder, and palm oil. I mean, who really cares where your heavily processed ingredients come from? Save the large environmental footprints for things like meat and vegetables that bring something more substantial to the table. Meanwhile the technology is maturing rapidly and should be ready to support offworld colonies when the time comes.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 05 2022, @06:03PM
As for designer organisms from labs on Earth... that's a bit rough for now. We don't actually have a whole lot of details about the chemical composition of Martian soil - we know the atomic composition fairly well, but chemically we can really only look for specific compounds we expect/hope to fine - discovering all the complex chemistry that we're not expecting, at least some of which is likely to be very relevant, needs a much more thorough soil analysis than our probes can perform, and we haven't yet returned any samples to Earth (though we have begun collecting them for a future mission to receive).
There's also a compelling argument to be made that we *shouldn't* return samples to Earth - at least not at first. If there's life on Mars the samples and return vehicle will be contaminated, and it would be all but impossible to avoid letting them loose on Earth during a return. Maybe harmless, maybe even _probably_ harmless - but it only takes one alien microbe that finds Earth to be a welcoming environment to potentially bring down our entire ecosystem. It's happened before - the first microbe to evolve photosynthesis ended up exterminating almost all other life on Earth with the toxic oxygen produced by its descendants.
Far safer to let an initial outpost on Mars take the risks, and only make return trips to Earth if no obvious problems show up there. Or alternately, at least return samples to the Lunar Gateway or ISS for analysis, which can be completely quarantined for months to at least have a chance to detect anything really obviously dangerous or pathogenic in the samples.